A Kakistocracy... if they can keep it

Through successive Democrat and Republican regimes our nation has fought other nation’s wars for them, allowed China to rape us blind economically, failed to stanch the flow of thousands of metric tons of drugs flowing across our borders every year, and failed to get reckless deficit spending under control.

Welcome to the Potemkin Village of Washington Power

What American constitutional government most urgently needs at present is for our Madisonian institutions—the presidency, the Congress, and the courts—to wrest back control of national security policy from an unelected and increasingly rogue national security establishment.

That ominous challenge to constitutionalism was on full display with the recent op-ed piece in the New York Times by retired Admiral William McRaven, in which he brashly warned that unless Trump jumped aboard the Forever War bandwagon, he must be removed, and “the sooner the better.”

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Tufts law professor Michael Glennon points out in a recent essay in Humanitas that the Cold War brought something new and ominous in military-civilian relations.

The national security bureaucracy became so large and omnipotent that the Madisonian branches of government became something like the British House of Lords, symbolically important but in reality without much power.

The executive, legislature, and judiciary became a kind of Potemkin village, with real national security power lodged in, as Glennon describes it, “a largely concealed managerial directorate, consisting of the several hundred leaders of the military, law enforcement and intelligence departments.”

9/11 amped up that bureaucracy on steroids, but it also caused millions of us to realize the “experts” were dime store knockoffs.